| Andreas Gal | |
| Birth Date: | 22 May 1976 |
| Birth Place: | Szeged, Hungary |
| Nationality: | German, American |
| Alma Mater: | University of California, Irvine |
| Thesis Title: | Efficient Bytecode Compilation and Verification in a Virtual Machine |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Michael Franz |
| Workplaces: | CEO, Silk Labs |
Andreas Gal is former chief technology officer at Mozilla. He is most notable for his work on several open source projects and Mozilla technologies.
Gal was born in Szeged, Hungary[1] and grew up in Lübeck, Germany.[2] During high school he worked on various open source AX.25 network stacks and designed a routing protocol for ham radio network nodes (INP3[3]) that became widely supported by AX.25 network routers.[4] [5] [6]
During his graduate studies at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg he was a codesigner of AspectC++, an aspect-oriented extension of C and C++ languages.[7] He later went on to obtain his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. His thesis introduced the concept of Tracing just-in-time compilation of high-level languages using trace trees.[8]
Gal joined Mozilla in 2008 and built TraceMonkey, the first JavaScript just-in-time compiler[9] in a web browser, only weeks before Google announced Chrome and the V8 JavaScript engine. After his work on TraceMonkey, Gal became the Director of Research at Mozilla. A notable research project he started was PDF.js, a PDF renderer in JavaScript and HTML5, which now replaces the Adobe PDF plug-in in Firefox.[10]
In 2011, Gal co-founded the Boot to Gecko project, which later became Firefox OS.[11]
In 2013, Gal was appointed the Vice President of Mobile Engineering of Mozilla.[12] In April 2014, Gal became the CTO of Mozilla.[13] In June 2015 he left Mozilla,[14] co-founding the Internet of Things start-up Silk Labs with two other members of the Firefox OS team (however, Silk Labs does not use Mozilla technologies).[15] Also in 2015, Gal became an adviser at Acadine Technologies; a startup newly founded by Li Gong (former president of Mozilla Corporation) which was to develop software based on Firefox OS.[16] As of 2018, Gal is an employee of Apple Inc.